Citizen Sketcher

A few weeks back I was part of an Urban Sketchers art exchange. I had partners in Girona and in Sao Paulo. There were other swaps with NYC. All told, about 40 artists participated. We each did sketches of our towns and sent them off to our partners. The drawings were meant to arrive as a surprise, so I’ve been waiting til is was safe to show these.

(Tara McPherson) « realidades (des)veladasTara McPherson (San Francisco, 1976). Se licenció en el Art Center de Pasadena en 2001 y realizó las prácticas en Rough Draft Studios, trabajando en la serie “Futurama”, de Matt Groening. Las personas y sus relaciones son el tema central de sus trabajos. Pinturas: Gallery 1 - "Why Do I Do What I Do", 2006location_drawings"Winter" in Los Angeles is mild and snowless, with many stretches of sunny days. Even so, this year is unusually dry and warm - so it was a relief to have some rain last week. It's been years since I've sketched a rainy scene, so I had to think about how to draw the rain - and settled on using a white gel pen over watercolors. I like visiting the beach in the winter when there are few crowds.

9 Tips for working with Masking FluidUsing masking fluid with watercolours can add much needed contrast to your paintings. The master of the masking fluid, Rob Dudley, reveals his nine steps to success I have always enjoyed the challenge of painting in watercolour.Travel Sketchbooking / updated 23Aug2013The old adage is correct: when you sketch what you see you engage more closely with what you are experiencing. Whether it's traveling across the country or across the globe. Or on your daily commute across town. Below are: General Info websitesWebsites with example sketchbooksPaper and BindingPens, Inks, and ToolsPaint KitField Bags and the StoolBook Lists: an "A" list (must-have books), a "B" list, and related books that I have liked

Lebbeus Woods: Early DrawingsFollowing the sad news that experimental architect and artist Lebbeus Woods passed away last week, here's a look back at some of his early drawing projects from the 1980s. Top: Centricity: Geomechanical Towers, 1987-1988Above: Centricity: Aero-Livinglab, 1986-1987 Taken from an exhibition held at the Friedman Benda gallery in New York earlier this year, the drawings show the dystopian architectural landscapes of Woods' imagination, including the Centricity and A-City projects that explore the political nature of architecture and its capacity to affect society. Above: Centricity, 1987 In Centricity, Woods drew a mythical city where towers appear to grow up out of the landscape, bearing a closer resemblance to machines than buildings, but with the same organic shapes that are more commonly found in nature. The A-City project was completed around the same time and investigates the relationship between technology and patterns of life.

CraftmonkeysThanks to everyone who showed up this past Saturday who either bought a painting or just offered support at the Saltaire Art and Music Festival in Fire Island. I was blown away by the response and delighted to see most of the paintings find new homes. Here are most of the works from the fair, and a few that will be available soon for sale through my Etsy shop.Goethe on the Psychology of Color and EmotionColor is an essential part of how we experience the world, both biologically and culturally. One of the earliest formal explorations of color theory came from an unlikely source — the German poet, artist, and politician Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in 1810 published Theory of Colors (public library; public domain), his treatise on the nature, function, and psychology of colors. Though the work was dismissed by a large portion of the scientific community, it remained of intense interest to a cohort of prominent philosophers and physicists, including Arthur Schopenhauer, Kurt Gödel, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. One of Goethe’s most radical points was a refutation of Newton’s ideas about the color spectrum, suggesting instead that darkness is an active ingredient rather than the mere passive absence of light.

Lines and Colors: a blog about drawing, painting, illustration, comics, concept art and other visual arts » Search Results » sketchcrawlAs artists there are those of us who wear many hats (no, no, I mean other than at those weird loft parties…), taking on several styles or different types of visual art for different reasons; sometimes out of necessity to both make a living and pursue personal interests, sometimes out of a desire to be versatile and sometimes just out of a love for working and experimenting with many different types of art. I suspect that Enrico Casarosa works in his many artistic areas for the latter reason, just because he enjoys and appreciates them and wants very much to enjoy all that they have to offer. Professionally, Casarosa is a storyboard artist for Pixar. He is also a character designer, comics artist, designer, illustrator, blogger and inveterate sketcher. Among his other accomplishments, Casarosa started and still oversees the SketchCrawl events, outdoor group drawing “expeditions” held in various cities around the world (some history here and here).

1: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1959, Frank Lloyd WrightVirtually all of the masterpieces of modern architecture have one thing in common: They’re constructed, at least in part, of concrete. Popularly maligned as the stuff of ugly, depressing housing blocks or cold industrial buildings, the material has also enabled the best designers to create the most breathtaking structures of the last century, from Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater to Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia and Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light. Those and many other Modernist landmarks are represented in Concrete, a new book from Phaidon thoughtfully and comprehensively compiled by William Hall to showcase the noble material’s breadth of form, texture, and purpose. Say what you will about Brutalists’ hulking monolithic masses, but even they occasionally employed concrete to, in Leonard Koren’s words, “create three-dimensional poetry.” As Koren writes in the accompanying essay, “Concrete is a noble material.

My Fountain PensI started a new Stillman & Birn Beta journal and started my first page showing the various Fountain Pens I have on hand. Each pen illustration was sketched and description written out using the individual pen illustrated. All pens have Noodler's Lexington Gray ink which when dry is water proof allowing for watercolor washes without ink bleed.